The Short, Unhappy Candidacy of Tom Eagleton

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We've reached the point in the presidential campaign when challengers select their running mates and incumbents (presumably) decide whether to keep theirs.

As I have said before, I don't expect Barack Obama to drop Joe Biden from his ticket — even though, as always, there are those in the president's party who advocate that — so there is probably little for Democrats to gain from this.

But Mitt Romney would be well advised to pay attention.

Forty years ago, only two weeks had passed since the McGovern–Eagleton ticket had been nominated by the Democrats to challenge the Nixon–Agnew ticket in the fall.

Things had gotten a little out of hand at the convention, and the presidential nominee wasn't able to give his acceptance speech until well after most people on the American mainland had gone to bed.

Most people, even the most optimistic of the Democrats, probably did not think that McGovern had much of a chance of defeating Richard Nixon. Nixon's approval ratings that summer ranged from the upper 50s to the low 60s.

When a president enjoys that kind of popularity about four months before the election, it usually suggests that a landslide is on the horizon — and Nixon's approval numbers in the summer of 1972 exceeded Reagan's in the summer of 1984 and were roughly the same as Clinton's in 1996.

(Both Reagan and Clinton were re–elected.)

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Nevertheless, while Democrats might have been resigned to the idea that they were going to lose, they had reason to believe, as they left their convention in Miami, that they could win eight or 10 states — not just the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, which is all the Democrats won that fall.

There was reason, in other words, for Democrats to believe that the nation would not tune them out before Labor Day, that their presidential ticket could at least keep up the pretense of being competitive long enough for their congressional candidates to get a foothold.

But that was before the train wreck of the Eagleton candidacy.

I guess the potential for the train wreck was there all along. The day after he clinched the presidential nomination, McGovern approached just about every big–name Democrat about the second spot on his ticket, and all turned him down. Time was running short so McGovern took the advice of Sen. Gaylord Nelson and offered it to Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton.

Nelson wasn't the first to suggest Eagleton, only the latest. As McGovern observed in an op–ed piece he wrote for the New York Times four years ago, Eagleton clearly wanted the spot. He had been lobbying for it, but McGovern was hesitant to offer it because "I didn't know Eagleton very well."

His first choice had been Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy turned him down and recommended Eagleton. McGovern's next choice was Sargent Shriver, who also turned him down and also recommended Eagleton. Similar stories unfolded with almost every person who was offered the spot on the ticket.

For awhile, the possibility of offering the spot to TV news anchor Walter Cronkite was discussed. Cronkite, as McGovern observed, had been named the most admired man in America, and the idea of having him on the ticket was "intriguing."

Eventually, McGovern and his staff dismissed the idea as "too unrealistic."

"I later learned from Walter that he would have accepted," McGovern wrote. "I wish we had chosen him."

Of that, there can be no doubt.

Despite whatever misgivings he may have had, McGovern offered the spot to Eagleton, who had assured the nominee's political director that "there was nothing in [Eagleton's] background that would be considered troublesome." He offered the spot to Eagleton 15 minutes before his deadline for announcing his choice.

But haste makes waste, the old saying says, and Eagleton had concealed a few things.

• It turned out that Eagleton had been treated for exhaustion and depression — including electroshock therapy.
• He had been taking strong anti–psychotic drugs.
• When McGovern saw a copy of Eagleton's medical records, he noted words like depression and suicidal tendencies.

Times have changed. In 2012, Americans are more tolerant of many things than they were in 1972.

And the revelation of a history of depression might not carry the same stigma today that it did then.

But the reaction that Eagleton encountered was hostile, fearful. In hindsight, it was inevitable that McGovern would have to drop his running mate.

But it wasn't that simple. There were complications.

He was hesitant, McGovern said later, to remove Eagleton from the ticket immediately because his daughter had suffered from depression, and he was concerned about how she would react.

That has a noble sound to it, but it was hard to reconcile with public actions — not unlike when Nixon's former attorney general and Watergate co–conspirator, John Mitchell, announced he was stepping down as director of Nixon's re–election campaign to spend more time with his wife.

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[Bob] Woodward asked several members of the [Washington] Post's staff ... if they believed the resignation was unconnected to Watergate. They did.

The next day, metropolitan editor Harry Rosenfeld frowned and told Woodward, "A man like John Mitchell doesn't give up all that power for his wife."

Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein

All the President's Men (1974)

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Similarly, I suppose, a man doesn't give up a major party's vice presidential nomination unless the rattling from the skeletons in his closet becomes too noisy.

In late July 1972, McGovern infamously announced that he was supporting his running mate "1000 percent," but, by the end of the month, Eagleton was off the ticket, and Shriver agreed to replace him.

In military parlance, McGovern had surrendered the high ground to Nixon — and virtually without a fight.

A Voice in the Wilderness

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"... George McGovern was about to have his moment. The moment was 2:48 in the morning. ... [T]he audience for his speech had dropped from 17,400,000 to 3,600,000. Yet he was speaking beautifully. He had sucked up from his experience in one of the longest campaigns in American history a knowledge of precisely those keys of emotion he himself could touch best, and the organ keys he played now were poetic and evangelical."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

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From the rear–view mirror perspective of American history, George McGovern was the Democrats' version of Barry Goldwater.

He went down to defeat in a landslide of historic proportions, as Goldwater did, but he was a glimpse into the party's future.

Just as the 1964 ascendance of Goldwater, with his right–wing rhetoric, foretold a time when the moderates would be overthrown within the GOP and the conservatives would rule, McGovern's nomination in 1972 hinted at the day when nominating liberals would be commonplace in the Democratic Party.

Likewise, in ways that I didn't comprehend until many years later, 1972 had a huge influence on me. My mother played a big part in that.

Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about my mother so I won't go into detail on that. Neither should it be necessary to remind my readers that I was raised a Democrat and voted for Democrats for many years — but I now consider myself an independent.

The designation Democrat wasn't quite as restrictive when I was a child as it is today. In 2012, if one self–identifies as a Democrat, one is essentially embracing a left–leaning agenda, but 40 years ago, there were still quite a few conservative Democrats — and quite a few middle–of–the–road ones, too.

In those days, the Democrats' tent was big enough to accommodate them all — but not necessarily comfortably. It made for some pretty spirited debates — and, sometimes, some unpredictable outcomes.

Now, as I say, Mom was a Democrat. She was unapologetically a liberal Democrat, and I have no doubt she would feel quite at home in today's Democrat Party. But, while I'm sure Mom would be pleased that the party has moved more in her philosophical direction, she might miss the give and take of the Democratic scraps of her day.

See, in 1972, Mom was part of the liberal wing of the party. In large part because of its anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, that wing had been gradually seizing power within the party ever since Lyndon Johnson was elected in a landslide in 1964 and proceeded to escalate the bloodshed in southeast Asia.

And the liberals had come to realize, after settling for LBJ's vice president in 1968 when the Gene McCarthy candidacy fell short, that winning the presidential nomination was the gateway to public acceptance.

George McGovern's nomination for the presidency in 1972 was, in many ways, the fruition of the liberal wing's struggle for the heart and soul of the party.

In hindsight, that nomination probably wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for interference from President Nixon's campaign operatives, but, at the time, it was seen as confirmation of the party's permanent shift to the left.

And, whether intended or not, that has been the outcome. The party did seem to be moving back to the center with the election of Jimmy Carter four years later, but since Carter's time, Democratic nominees have tended to be — pardon the pun — progressively liberal.

I was a child in 1972, but I was an enthusiastic McGovern supporter. It wasn't so much because I understood many of the things of which he spoke but because Mom could always explain things to me in ways I could understand. And Mom was a McGovern supporter — so I was a McGovern supporter. Such was my logic in 1972.

The race for the 1972 nomination was extremely contentious. The party's more centrist establishment tended to favor the guys who had been on the '68 ticket, Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, and the conservative wing liked George Wallace and Henry Jackson.

The emergence of an insurgent from the left drew a united effort to deprive McGovern of the nomination. It failed, but it made things quite interesting — especially after an attempt to assassinate Wallace inflated his vote totals in some late primaries.

Things didn't necessarily go smoothly when the Democrats held their convention in July 1972, but, to be sure, it was a lot smoother than it had been four years earlier, when antiwar protests turned into clashes with police in the streets of Chicago, but it was far from incident–free. In 1972, though, the Democrats kept their battles inside the convention hall.

In the buildup to the Democrats' 1972 challenge to Richard Nixon, they had relaxed their rules, allowing many groups that had not been adequately represented in the past to have an enhanced presence (and, consequently, enhanced power) at the convention.

That was a double–edged sword. Sometimes those battles had great substantive significance — debates over some platform planks went on all night — and sometimes they were frivolous.

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Take for example the ridiculous fight over the vice presidential nominee.

For anyone who listened to the roll call of the states and heard some of the names of those who received a vote or two (actual people, such as McGovern's wife, Chinese leader Mao Zedong and TV journalist Roger Mudd and fictional TV character Archie Bunker), it was hard not to reach the conclusion that the groups who had been ignored in the past were flexing their newfound political muscles a bit — and they were doing so at their own nominee's expense.

Modern political conventions are so tightly managed that the nominee's acceptance speech is always delivered at a time that ensures maximum exposure in all 50 states. (This year, in fact, the Democrats forced the NFL to move its traditional season kickoff from Thursday night to Wednesday night so as not to conflict with Barack Obama's acceptance speech.)

But instead of giving his speech to a primetime audience on Thursday night, McGovern wound up speaking to a TV audience of mostly insomniacs. It was past midnight in most U.S. time zones when he started to speak.

McGovern tried to make light of the fact that his choice for running mate, Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton, was challenged by "only 39 other nominees." He also poked fun at Nixon's selection of Spiro Agnew as his running mate four years earlier in a process that had been criticized as too rushed. As a result, he said, Democrats had learned "that it pays to take a little more time."

McGovern would soon regret those words.

Nevertheless, as White observed, he gave a great speech. But hardly anyone saw it.

I did.

It was summer, after all, and I was a kid. Staying up late was nothing special for me, and I remember sitting alone in the wee hours of the morning in my family's living room with my cassette tape recorder, dutifully recording the speech for Mom to hear the next day.

Like most folks, she had gone to bed long before the speech was given. I remember the house was mostly dark and mostly quiet — and I remember that I tried to keep the volume on the TV down so as not to disturb my parents or my brother.

I remember playing the tape for Mom the next day. She seemed to agree with most of it, nodded her head sometimes, broke into smiles at points, but she didn't seem as enthusiastic as I expected her to be.

Maybe she knew, somehow, what was to come. I was too young to realize it, of course, but I'm sure Mom was aware of the long odds McGovern faced.

"That was a good speech" was all she said after listening to my tape of the speech.

I was always sorry that she never got to see it.

Because, when you look at the 1972 campaign in that rear–view mirror of history, it is all too clear that George McGovern did not have many good days.

But this day 40 years ago was one of them — even though McGovern wound up delivering his acceptance speech to an audience made up mostly of children of the night.

Eagleton's withdrawal in a couple of weeks would not be a good day for McGovern, nor would the repeated spectacle of McGovern practically begging every prominent Democrat to be on his ticket — and being turned down by everyone until he came to Sargent Shriver.

There were no presidential debates in 1972. In fact, it was the last presidential election that did not feature at least one debate. It will always be anyone's guess whether a debate would have been a high point — or another low point — for the McGovern campaign.

And, on this night in 1972, what could safely be said to be McGovern's worst night of the campaign, his 49–state landslide loss to Richard Nixon, was nearly four months away.

Democrats in 2012 may feel they have been unfairly criticized at times, but their trials and tribulations have been laughable compared to what McGovern endured.

You could probably count the number of good days he had on a single hand — maybe two.

When he did have a good one, it had to be savored.

Sargent Shriver Dies

Sargent Shriver died today, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.

When I think of Sarge Shriver, I remember the summer of 1972, when Tom Eagleton was forced from the Democratic ticket because he had been treated for depression.

I wasn't very old that summer, and many of the details were really over my head. But I remember how star–crossed George McGovern's presidential campaign seemed. We later learned that much of that was the work of Richard Nixon's "dirty tricks" operatives, but, in truth, McGovern brought much of it on himself. In the Eagleton matter, McGovern asked him to be his running mate without doing a thorough job of conducting a background check, and he paid a price for it.

When McGovern started winning presidential primaries (and there were far fewer of them then than there are now), the other Democrats in the race seemed to gang up on him. As I got older, I came to understand that that was the usual behavior of politicians who realize they were not the people's choice but are reluctant to throw in the towel; at the time, it struck me as unfair, which it was — but that was beside the point.

McGovern survived the challenges to his campaign, but the nominating convention, which should have been his moment in the sun, was acrimonious, and his choice of a vice presidential nominee — for reasons that my young mind could never quite grasp — was hardly treated to the kind of rousing endorsement that presumptive running mates can depend on today.

That convention, conducted in the shadow of the 1968 campaign, when so many things seemed to be done behind closed doors, was wide open, supposedly in the spirit of true democracy, but it wound up being mostly a televised exercise in pure disorganization, utter chaos.

Under the new rules, a few legitimate candidates for the vice presidential slot were allowed to have nominating and seconding speeches made on their behalf; then, during the balloting, delegates were free to cast their votes for anyone they pleased, which led to a circus atmosphere.

As I recall, about three dozen other people received votes from the delegates. Some of the nominees were rather frivolous — both foreign (Mao Tse–tung) and fictional (Archie Bunker) — and no single "candidate" ever seriously threatened to take the nomination away from Eagleton. It was a waste of time and did not give Americans who were watching the proceedings during prime time the impression that the Democrats were organized enough to find solutions to the nation's problems.

By the time Eagleton had been officially nominated and McGovern started making his acceptance speech, it probably wasn't even prime time in Hawaii. Very few people saw McGovern deliver a speech that drew praise from historian Theodore H. White in "The Making of the President 1972."

Anyway, shortly after the convention, the Democrats were rocked by the revelations that Eagleton had been treated for depression and that his treatment had included electroshock therapy.

McGovern insisted that he was standing by his running mate. He was behind Eagleton "1,000%," I believe he said. But the pressure became too great, and, in spite of his public pledge, McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw, which he did.

And, for awhile there in the summer of 1972, the Democrats had a presidential nominee but no vice presidential nominee. It became a running joke that McGovern was offering the spot to everyone — and everyone was turning it down. The prospect of taking on President Nixon, whose lead in the public opinion polls seemed to be ever growing, was daunting at best.

Accepting the role of running mate was seen as comparable to accepting a ticket on board the Titanic with full knowledge that the ship would strike an iceberg and sink.

But Shriver accepted the role and took on the challenge with considerable gusto — even with the knowledge that Nixon was likely to carry all 50 states, which he very nearly did.

It was Shriver's opportunity to be the "political bride" — he had always regarded himself as a bridesmaid, Teddy White wrote, even though he had done some important things in his life.

At the request of his brother–in–law, President Kennedy, he was the first director of the Peace Corps.

Then, under Lyndon Johnson, he crafted the administration's war on poverty and was responsible for founding several initiatives that I remember my mother particularly appreciated including Head Start.

In fact, between Shriver's work and his wife's work with Special Olympics, they may have been the most successful socially activist couple in modern American history. And now, of course, they're both gone. Eunice Kennedy Shriver preceded Sarge in 2009.

They left behind quite a legacy.